MU Law Blog on Nurse and Allied Healthcare Immigration OCTOBER 2016 VISA BULLETIN Posted: 09 Sep 2016 06:29 AM PDT The Department of State has just issued the October 2016 Visa Bulletin. This is the first Visa Bulletin of Fiscal Year 2017. As the fiscal year begins we are able to make some educated guesses at where the Visa Bulletin will be in the future. October 2016 Visa Bulletin Final Action Dates Applications with these dates may be approved for their Green Card (Permanent Residency card). Employ- ment based All Charge- ability Areas Except Those Listed CHINA- mainland born INDIA MEXICO PHILIPPINES 1st C C C C C 2nd C 12FEB12 15JAN07 C C 3rd 01JUN16 22JAN13 15MAR05 01JUN16 01DEC10 MU Law Analysis All Other: The EB-2 has been current for many years. The EB-3 progression continues. For Consular processing cases a June 2016 date is effectively Current. China: As expected, these dates moved forward 2+ years. Unusually, the China EB-3 has a more favorable date than EB-2, although this phenomenon has happened often for China as a result of many Chinese EB-3 workers “upgrading” their applications to EB-2. India: EB-2 India had a notable progression from last month. It will be interesting to see how this date moves forward. In the Summer of 2007 hundreds of thousands of I-485 Applications were filed a result of VisaGate. As a result of that bulk of filings, this number could slow in the forthcoming months. EB-3 had its usual one month forward movement. Mexico: Mirrors All Other in all aspects. Philippines: EB-3 moved ahead by another six months. The Phillippine EB-3 number essentially cleaned out all 2010 EB-3 visas in just two months. This is what we have expected. (Our note from May 2016: “MU Law believes that Philippines EB-3 will continue to steadily move forward in the coming months. We expect it to move into 2009 in the by early summer, and may reach 2010 by the end of this fiscal year.”). We expect more of the same fast progression in FY2017 for Philippine EB-3. We expect that the Philippine EB-3 number will progress at least three years in...

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Every year, USCIS approves 65,000 cap-subject H-1B visas and an additional 20,000 H-1B visas for candidates with advanced degrees. Every year for the past ten years, the number of applicants for these visas has exceeded the cap. When this happens, CIS initiates a lottery that utilizes a computer-generated randomized selection process to determine which petitions get reviewed and which get returned to the sender. The H-1B lottery has always been shrouded in mystery. Despite claims of commitment to transparency, CIS has not been forthcoming with information about the mechanisms of this lottery. There is no way to hold CIS accountable for this process and possible flaws or unfairness resulting from it. There is no way to tell whether this process even holds up to statutory standards without the ability to see and review it. For this reason, a lawsuit has been brought against CIS and the US Department of Homeland Security by the American Immigration Council and the American Immigration Lawyers Association with the purpose to seek information about the inner workings of the H-1B lottery process. H-1B visas are dual-purpose, non-immigrant visas that allow highly skilled foreign nationals with a US bachelor’s degree or its equivalent or higher to live and work in the United States for increments of three years to fill specialized job positions. Demand for highly skilled workers with highly specialized skills and knowledge in the rapidly expanding US IT industry has been a driving force for the number of H-1B petitions filed growing every year. CIS must continue to accept H-1B petitions for at least one business week before closing its doors. The past two years, the cap has been exceeded within five days of when CIS begins accepting petitions. While the lawsuit is a good step in the right direction to bring some insight and accountability to the mysterious H-1B lottery process, there is little that can currently be done by H-1B candidates and their employers and lawyers to affect whether or not the petition makes the lottery. Besides filing on April First, of course. “The internal workings of the H-1B lottery system are out of all of our control or understanding for now,” International education expert and...

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